A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [149]
The woman I dated through college and after, the one whose question sparked the dream of cranes, flew out to get me to eat. I could not, and after a few days she checked me back into the hospital. She called my mother in England, where she was thinking of staying, and said, "If you want to see your son alive, you need to come home." She then said to me, "I do not want to watch you die." She flew back to her home.
The doctors continued their maltreatment, and I continued to lose weight. They scheduled me for a colostomy. Had my mother not returned, and pulled me from the hospital, I would probably not have survived my death to be reborn: a decade later I speak easily of these deaths and rebirths, but in all truth they are dangerous, and messy. This spiritual death, this collapse, does not come without its price, exacted in pain and tears and oftentimes physical death as well.
After speaking with experts on Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis (this latter the disease with which I'd been misdiagnosed), and after learning of the wrong tests done and right tests undone, my mother took me to another hospital, this in Salt Lake City. There, they diagnosed me immediately with Crohn's (a case so classic that later, when part of my colon was removed, they used it as a teaching tool). The doctors tried to strengthen me with intravenous feeding. They weaned me off the steroids I'd gotten from earlier doctors, and for several weeks tried many medications to control the disease.
The recurrence rate of Crohn's following surgery is high— according to one cheerful account, "greater than ninety-nine percent," and according to another about fifty percent per year— and for this reason the physicians were hesitant to operate. But I had another bleed, and then another, and despite transfusions began passing out from loss of blood.
I awoke the morning after surgery to a delicious absence of pain. Sure, my belly hurt where they'd opened me up, but it was nothing compared to the cramps. They were gone. I pulled myself up, and looked out the window to the dawn sunlight reflecting off scattered hills to the west. The surgeon came in, told me they'd removed about two-thirds of my colon ("We left as much as possible for next time"), and was followed shortly by a nurse who told me to pee. I told her I couldn't. She said I needed to so they could make sure my kidneys still worked. I told her I'd be happy to, but I couldn't just right then. She said they needed to know right away, so she'd go get a catheter. I told her I'd try real hard. When I handed back the bottle, it was closer to one-tenth full than nine-tenths empty.
I went home as soon as my guts awakened, and through that fall my mother cooked for me four or five meals per day to fatten me up. I remember that the first night back I was too weak to climb the stairs to my room, and so had to crawl. A week later, on my first walk outdoors, I made it only to the next city lot before returning home exhausted.
I spent that fall and winter taking long slow walks to the river, or down to the towns park where I would stand alone and shoot baskets for hours on end. When other people showed up, I was not yet strong enough to play in games, but by spring I stood my own, and played pickup basketball and Softball as often as I could.
Through that winter my mother often said to me, in response to my despair at the slow return of strength, "It took you a long time to get sick, and it will take you a long time to get well."
A Time of Sleeping
"The part of the mind that is dark to us in this culture, that is sleeping in us, that we name 'unconscious,' is the knowledge that we are inseparable from all other beings in the universe." Susan Griffin
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